In my experience, what Martin Luther King Jr. calls “thinking intensively and critically” is very different from what my high school teachers called “critical thinking”, most especially by the way Dr. King links intelligence and learning to the development of character, that is, growth as a person. Too often in my past, teachers mentioned critical thinking only as a mental activity of seeing through stereotypes, evaluating both sides of issues and understanding and accepting differences. As worthwhile as these are, I have found that high level thinking without having a more enlightened character is simply inadequate. That was a recent, very positive experience with two very nice people of different faiths. As much as we had been taught in class about prejudice, the recent terrorists attacks across the world bred a good deal of ill-will in …show more content…
It may be that it is in small and thoughtful gestures that we can change ingrained, thoughtless prejudice. In fact, after intervening in some teasing and being told, quite rightly, to mind my own business by both victims of my classmates’ careless fun, I hit upon a wonderful plan suitable to my character. I hope I am not building it up as something equal to Martin Luther King Jr. joining of character to thoughtfulness in its accomplishments, because in the end it was only a class presentation. Frankly, public speaking is my greatest fear, but this time it was from my heart and went beautifully. The theme was my friendship with these people of other faiths, and how much I learned about my own religion from them. I spoke of how much it hurt me when they were teased, and explained how much it lacked even common sense, still less the higher-order thinking skills our teacher was always talking about. I could not have my friends in the class during a business day, but I had the sense to tape my presentation which, almost for the first time, went well for